Maybe you should interview and find out why people do this. I have been coding for 10 years professionally, started coding in middle school and high school competitively. I live and breathe tech because I love it. Yet to work at all the nice companies I have to be able to identify an a problem pattern and implement an ‘optimal’ algorithm twice in an hour or it doesn’t matter.

Also what constitutes an awesome GitHub? Because unless you run a project with > 100 stars it’s little more than academic and doesn’t matter.